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The Secret History of Rock 'n' Roll

3.33 of 5 stars 3.33 · rating details · 15 ratings · 5 reviews

Sex. Drugs. Loud music. Wild costumes. Dazzling light shows. These words can all describe a great rock concert or a hot dance club, but they were also part and parcel of the ancient cultural phenomenon known as the �Mystery religions.” In this book, author Christopher Knowles shows how the long-dead Mystery religions got a secular reincarnation when a new musical form call...more

Paperback, 240 pages

Published October 5th 2010 by Viva Editions (first published September 1st 2010)

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Feb 07, 2012 Bruce Baugh rated it 2 of 5 stars

My first abandoned-before-finishing reading of 2012.

The good part of this book is up front, with a review of various mystery cults and their practices that makes an effort to pull out points of modern interest from archaic descriptions. I like looking at areas of unexpected continuity in human life, alongside the ways cultures and generations vary a lot. Human diversity is neat! Knowles has to do a fair amount of speculative filling of gaps in between he available written and physical evidence,...more My first abandoned-before-finishing reading of 2012.

The good part of this book is up front, with a review of various mystery cults and their practices that makes an effort to pull out points of modern interest from archaic descriptions. I like looking at areas of unexpected continuity in human life, alongside the ways cultures and generations vary a lot. Human diversity is neat! Knowles has to do a fair amount of speculative filling of gaps in between he available written and physical evidence, but that's fine, he's pretty good about noting when he's doing so.

Next comes an effort to trace lines of continuous inheritance from antiquity to modernity for various mystery cult practices. This is very much more speculative, and gets into something that really irritates me more and more as I get older. He keeps talking about the people engaging with a particular fad or trend as "everybody". He just doesn't seem to have any awareness that, for just about any fad you care to name, lots of people lives are not especially changed by it, even if others really get into it. Nor does he show much awareness of the difference between short-lived enthusiastic obsession and actual changes in life, either in his own case or anyone else's.

I think this is more than just harrumphing on my part. Piled up in instance after instance, it has the cumulative effect of simply erasing the existence and significance of anyone who was neither ga-ga for the next hot thing nor zealously crusading against it. If you want to talk about the history of a particular sub-culture or kind of community, of course, you can and should focus on it. But if you want to say something about the society around it, you need to start by noting that other people exist and are being moved by other concerns. This book doesn't give much sign that Knowles is aware of people who aren't hip and innovative or not-quite-so-cool followers and imitators or evil reactionaries in terms beyond "square".

After the compressed history, there's a section in which Knowles looks at various popular and/or influential rock figures in terms of archetypes taken from the gods worshipped by mystery cults. This is an idea I'm very open to - I like applying unusual frames of reference to familiar subjects, and believe that the effort can be genuinely illuminating as well as just plain fun. This particular effort, however, fell apart for me for two reasons, and led to me abandoning the book with about a third to go.

First, the histories of the various figures are very shallow, and completely centered on the personal taste of someone whose musical awareness built up in the '70s, peaked, and seems not to have a lot of room for any of the innovations of the last twenty-odd years. That's fine for personal memoirs and such - I mean, people's lives and tastes are what they are - but not so good if you want to say much to people who aren't completely synced with your individual outlook.

Second, he gets cutesy, and in particular he gets cutesy in talking about sexualities. In a compact list of reportedly bisexual rock stars, for instance, there were entries like "Jimi Hendrix. According to [sources snipped because I'm not going to go transcribe from the audiobook], he sometimes liked to kiss the guy." and "John Lennon. According to [sources also snipped], he liked to hold more than hands." This doesn't actually convey much that I would consider useful, and it just grated more and more as he kept doing it.

So I stopped.
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Jun 07, 2012 Patrick Neylan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: music, non-fiction, history, religion, mythology

In a piece of spectacularly speculative hokum, Knowles tries to link the modern devotion of music fans to ancient mystery cults. Academically it's all nonsense of course, but it's a fun diversion and it does put a different spin on a subject that's produced thousands of books without much new being said since Lester Bangs bowed out three decades ago.

Knowles seems to know his mythology and his music, but he doesn't really do the research required to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. There are n...more

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Feb 01, 2011 Calvin added it · review of another edition

Shelves: music

What does it say about a book, or the author, when I find it a bit to pretentious?

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Mar 13, 2012 Matthew Tote rated it 3 of 5 stars

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Sep 13, 2011 Marion marked it as to-read

Shelves: summer-2011-cut-short

p. 29 // p. 145

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Shelves: nonfiction, music, history, rock, relegion

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